Perform or perish?

Dalhousie theatre professors perform in shows across the country to help them on their way to tenure, to keep there skills up therefore becoming better teachers and contributing to local community arts culture.

Key Points:

In academia, it’s known as “publish or perish”—referring to the pressure to publish work for a professor to secure a tenure-track position. But in the Departments of Music and Theatre, that pressure can also be referred to as “perform or perish.”
Prof. Susan Stackhouse arrived at Dalhousie in 1996 knowing the expectation was that academics in any department needed to publish. But then the department, and the faculty, changed to realize the importance of the professors’ creative pursuits as well.
Susan Stackhouse is a voice, speech and dialect specialist; she collects dialects for the world’s first online dialect and accent repository, the International Dialects of English Repository.
Prof. Margot Dionne and her entire third-year class took a road trip to Montreal to catch her performance when she appeared in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People at the Segal Centre in Montreal a few years ago.

Pull Quotes:

“If we’re going to be credible at all with our students, we need to be pursuing creative activities in the professional realm." - Susan Stackhouse, an actress and acting professor in the Department of Theatre at Dalhousie University
“It helps us to stay in tune with student needs and what they’re grappling with. If we don’t practice ourselves, we can become numb to having that crisis of confidence when you’re waiting backstage waiting for your cue to come on or when the words you know inside and out suddenly evaporate into thin air." -Susan Stackhouse, an actress and acting professor in the Department of Theatre at Dalhousie University
“What we do on the professional stage—and learn during the rehearsal process—absolutely comes right back in the classroom.” -Rob McClure, an actor and acting professor in the Department of Theatre at Dalhousie University
“People are realizing what a practical artist has to accomplish to be perceived as equal to an academic for tenure and promotion.” -Susan Stackhouse, an actress and acting professor in the Department of Theatre at Dalhousie University
“There’s a lot to learn by watching a performance. And you’ll never have a more penetrating audience than acting students.” -Margot Dionne, an actress and acting professor in the Department of Theatre at Dalhousie University